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From news.sciencemag.org:
In the wake of several high-profile laboratory safety incidents involving smallpox, anthrax, and dangerous flu strains, the U.S. government is planning to ask federally funded laboratories to pause all work involving “high-consequence” pathogens for 24 hours in order to inventory stocks, according to groups that represent research universities.
“Essentially, what the government will request is a short term on the order of 24 hours suspension of research involving high-consequence pathogens in order to allow institutional lab personnel to take stock of what pathogens they have stored in freezers, cold rooms, etc.,” reads a memo distributed to universities today and signed by Carol Blum of the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR) in Washington, D.C.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday August 28 2014, @02:40PM
It's nice to project the image that the government is "taking inventory issues seriously" in light of recent troubling events.
But even a complete inventory of infectious stocks wouldn't have uncovered many of the recent issues, nor would it help prevent similar issues in the future.
Take the recent smallpox in a storage closet [cnn.com] issue. It's likely the smallpox in question was accidentally left in the "unused" storage room in 1972. It's not on anyone's active inventory, and hasn't been in decades. An inventory of current stocks won't help find any similar issues.
The problem with taking inventory (of anything, really) is that you almost always have discrepancies. Either unexplained excesses, or material that's unaccounted for. For any inventory of significant size, you're going to find something that doesn't tally (I worked at one point for an industrial company that did a three month "hypercontrol" experiment where we locked an inventory subset in a cage, and had at least two people inspect and sign off on any material flow and count in/out of the locked cage. We STILL had anomalies). Often this is inadvertent - we lost the paperwork on the disposal of something that was properly destroyed, or got a quantity wrong somewhere. Or it's a case like this where we legitimately left something in a closet.
At some point in the past, someone noted the anomaly, potentially did some investigation to see if the anomaly was recoverable (e.g. did we look in that other box), for some reason failed to check the old storeroom, and so "wrote it off" as an inventory discrepancy. And from then on, it wasn't IN the expected inventory.
If you really want to proactively stop incidents like this, you'd need to go back to the dawn of tracing, find EVERY inventory anomaly that was ever written off, and explain EVERY SINGLE ONE. That's likely an impossible task.
I don't have an issue with requesting an inventory (though I'd be highly disturbed if there wasn't a process where taking inventories like this at regular intervals was the expected norm). But it's only going to uncover relatively recent issues. And gives no guidance on what to do other than shrug shoulders if they find an issue.
The bigger thing to audit (which this makes no mention of) is CONTROLS - what controls are in place around these stocks? How are they secured? Can that security be bypassed unnoticed? How do we keep track of inventory? How are moves or changes to inventories recorded? Who has the ability to modify those records? Can we back up "what's in the log" with some independent check (e.g. security footage)? How frequently are our inventories audited?
We have reams of documentation around how public companies need to do inventory and tracking. We should demand even more accountability (and transparency) from groups dealing in deadly materials.
(Score: 1) by jbWolf on Friday August 29 2014, @09:43AM
I used to work for a special department at a university that dealt with disabled students so we had specialized equipment. I did inventory two years in a row. My bosses were impressed by how thorough I was. Despite that, I couldn't find a few items that first year. I asked everyone where it could be or who it might have been loaned to. I reported the missing items to my bosses, some of that equipment was removed from inventory, and life moved on. The second year I did it, I pulled my old check list out and was amazed to compare the results. Not only did we have a few items missing that were easy to find last time, but some of the items that were missing the first year were now easily found the second year.
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